Timeline-based planning is a paradigm that models temporal planning domains as sets of independent, but interacting, components. The behavior of the components can be described by means of a number of state variables whose evolution and interactions over time are governed by a set of temporal constraints. This paradigm is different from the one underlying the common action-based formalisms à la PDDL, where the focus is on what can be done by an executive agent. Although successfully used in many real-world applications, little work has been done on the expressiveness and complexity of the timeline-based formalism. The present paper provides a characterization of the complexity of non- flexible timeline-based planning, by proving that a general formulation of the problem is EXPSPACE-complete. Such a result extends a previous work where the same complexity bound was proved for a restricted fragment of timeline-based planning that was shown to be expressive enough to capture action-based temporal planning. In addition, we prove that requiring an upper bound to the solution horizon as part of the input decreases the complexity of the problem, that becomes NEXPTIME-complete.

Gigante, N., Montanari, A., Cialdea, M., Orlandini, A. (2017). Complexity of Timeline-based Planning. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2017) (pp.116-124). AAAI Press.

Complexity of Timeline-based Planning

Marta Cialdea Mayer;Andrea Orlandini
2017-01-01

Abstract

Timeline-based planning is a paradigm that models temporal planning domains as sets of independent, but interacting, components. The behavior of the components can be described by means of a number of state variables whose evolution and interactions over time are governed by a set of temporal constraints. This paradigm is different from the one underlying the common action-based formalisms à la PDDL, where the focus is on what can be done by an executive agent. Although successfully used in many real-world applications, little work has been done on the expressiveness and complexity of the timeline-based formalism. The present paper provides a characterization of the complexity of non- flexible timeline-based planning, by proving that a general formulation of the problem is EXPSPACE-complete. Such a result extends a previous work where the same complexity bound was proved for a restricted fragment of timeline-based planning that was shown to be expressive enough to capture action-based temporal planning. In addition, we prove that requiring an upper bound to the solution horizon as part of the input decreases the complexity of the problem, that becomes NEXPTIME-complete.
2017
Gigante, N., Montanari, A., Cialdea, M., Orlandini, A. (2017). Complexity of Timeline-based Planning. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2017) (pp.116-124). AAAI Press.
File in questo prodotto:
File Dimensione Formato  
2017-ICAPS.pdf

accesso aperto

Tipologia: Documento in Post-print
Dimensione 697.86 kB
Formato Adobe PDF
697.86 kB Adobe PDF Visualizza/Apri

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11590/326758
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus 19
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 11
social impact